11/30/2005

Another post related to Andrew Delbanco's Melville: His Life and Work. Scott Eric Kaufman remarks of Delbanco's contention that "Melville should not be censured for his failure to condemn slavery because the experience of living in a tumultuous time includes 'both the yes and no of [a] culture'" that "Normally I find this quasi-æstheticist pose painfully insufficient—a flaccid defense of New Critical orthodoxy. . . ."

But this is not an "aestheticist" pose at all. It has nothing to do with aesthetics. "New Critical orthodoxy" would hold that whether Melville was an abolitionist or not has no bearing one way or the other on how we judge his work. We might indeed condemn Melville himself for failing to become an abolitionist (at least overtly), but I can't see how our condemnation would then extend to his fiction. Some of it does deal with slavery ("Benito Cereno"), although even if we were to conclude that, for example, the slave ship captain in this story is portrayed too sympathetically (I don't agree with that interpretation), our literary judgment would (or should) have nothing to do with our moral judgment of Melville's reluctance to see the United States split itself apart to wage civil war.

"Historicism in the service of moral and political complexity," as Scott characterizes Delbanco's approach, is not the same thing as historicism in the service of aesthetic complexity, or any other kind of aesthetic effect. (It should be pointed out that Scott goes on to discuss the merits of "moral and political complexity" in the context of William Dalrymple's NYRB essay, "Inside the Madrassa.") Unfortunately, New Criticism has apparently come to be seen as an all-purpose kind of apologia for complexity of all kinds, a convenient whipping-boy in circumstances in which "complexity" is seen by some as an excuse for evading obvious moral distinctions. But let's be clear: New Criticism was a method of reading works of literature that emphasized the aesthetic qualities of those works, that attempted to identify the characteristics of literature--and of reading literature--that marked it off from other modes of discourse. In doing so, it minimized the importance of history, politics, and ethics, but only to remind us that those are subjects with their own discursive conventions and to suggest how little they are enhanced by yoking poetry or fiction to their service. It says nothing about the role of these subjects--or their complexity--in human affairs more generally.

The only thing "quasi-æstheticist" about Delbanco's account would be an attempt to transfer to Melville's political attitudes a notion of "complexity" that finally applies only to literature, not to life. Melville doesn't get off the hook for transferring the literary complexity of his novels and stories to his decisions in life. (Although some issues are indeed very complex.) Similarly, Delbanco shouldn't be allowed to make Melville's life into another version of his work. I don't say that he does this, but it's the only way I can make sense of the claim that there's something "quasi-aetheticist" about his argument.

At the end of her review of Andrew Delbanco's Melville: His World and Work, Vivian Gornick asserts that:

What is needed for a figure as iconized as Melville is a biographer possessed by a flash of original insight around which the "life" can be organized, the kind that is very little dependent on documentation. The only obligation of such insight is that it prove genuine, not fabricated, and that it deepen the writing until something true about the man who wrote Moby-Dick is acutely felt by responsive readers who are sure to recognize the close of a yawning gap when they see one.

Actually, what is needed is for would-be biographers to give Melville a rest from their labors for a while. Maybe forever. All that such works accomplish, in my opinion, is to encourage the idea, which Gornick expresses here, that what readers need is to know "something true about the man who wrote Moby-Dick." Readers don't need to know anything about the author of Moby-Dick; they need to read the novel. They don't need a biographer to organize Melville's life-story around "a flash of insight"; they need to read Melville's stories. The "yawning gap" that needs to be closed is not that between "the miles of scholarship informed by received wisdom that already surround Melville's life and work" and the effort to make Melville "live anew for the current generation of readers"; it is the gap between experiencing Melville's work for what it has to offer and settling instead for biographies that only deflect our attention from the work in favor of gossip about the writer. (From what I've read about Delbanco's book, it seems to be less guilty of this than many other biographies of writers.)

Gornick's main objection to Delbanco's biography seems to be that it is too dependent on the "authority" provided by previous commentators on Melville: "Now, Delbanco is a sophisticated writer who could easily have put these sentiments into words of his own. Yet he chose not to. Not, I think, out of the ordinary academic habit of piling up superficial appeals to authority but rather because he is intent on creating a brilliant surround for the work of a writer he does, in fact, love indiscriminately; one that is meant to draw us irresistibly inside the persuasion that Melville's work is not only majestic but inordinately protean: It can and does mean all things to all people in all times, accommodating itself easily to whatever system of interpretation the cultural moment brings into focus. . ."

"Inordinately protean" is really just a way of saying that a book like Moby-Dick is always worth reading and re-reading, that readers' experiences of the novel are always going to be productively various. No one interpretation is going to pin it down, and, despite Gornick's impatience with the citation of critical sources, becoming familiar with other interpretations is only going to enrich one's appreciation of Moby-Dick's literary accomplishments in the long run. In other words, the existence of so much critical commentary on Melville's work is only testimony to its continued relevance as writing that still lives in the present: an interpretation is always an act of recovery for the present, a translation of the work into currently pertinent terms of understanding. Gornick's "original" biographer identifying "something true" about Melville would actually have an effect exactly opposite of the one she supposes. It would remove Melville's fiction from the critical conversation surrounding it and subject it to the biographer's "insight," which, since it is an insight about the writer rather than what he wrote, would be all the more constrictive and extraneous, Melville the dead celebrity.

Ron Rosenbaum recently wrote something similar about Dmitri Nabokov's reluctance to have his father's legacy embroiled in biographical controversy:

I understand Dmitri's impatience with the biographical fetishism that has invaded literature—a product of celebrity culture, I’d argue. I certainly see it in the cultural capital of Shakespeare biographies as compared to studies of Shakespeare’s work.

If the destruction of The Original of Laura [V. Nabokov's unpublished final work] is inevitable. . .it’s the reductive biographizing—pathographizing—of literature that is responsible.

Read the works! Life is too short to care more deeply about the life of the one who wrote them, whose secrets are usually irretrievable anyway.

11/28/2005

I'm very pleased that Miriam Burstein (The Little Professor) has agreed to join me in a "dueling review" of E.L. Doctorow's The March. Miriam is a specialist in historical fiction, so I offer my own take on the novel in all due deference to Miriam's expertise and wide reading in the genre. Readers are invited to discuss the issues raised here in the Comments section.

Man of Sorrows
by Miriam Burstein

While historical novels about the Revolution and the Civil War are equal, no doubt, when it comes to sheer tonnage, it’s still arguably the case that novelists today treat the Civil War with greater urgency than they do the Revolution [1]. In part, this sense of urgency derives from ongoing battles over the Civil War’s origins, meaning, and relevance; in part, it derives from the sense that the war poses formal problems for the historical novelist. How, that is, does the novelist integrate this rupture in the nation’s fabric into the narrative’s structure? To what extent should the war play itself out in figurative language, characterization, imagery, and so forth? The answers to these questions have been as multitudinous as the novels themselves, whether the author turns to romance (Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind), to the “Great Man” school of historical fiction (Gore Vidal’s Lincoln), or to the multiplot novel (Thomas Keneally’s Confederates).

At first glance, the form of E. L. Doctorow’s The March looks remarkably familiar—in fact, just like that of his most famous novel, Ragtime. Like Ragtime, The March is a multiplot novel, in which a dizzying array of characters criss-cross their varying paths while following General Sherman’s train. And, like Ragtime, characters wander onstage and then wander off again, leaving as abruptly as they came. (Think, for example, of the disappearance of Tateh’s wife—understandably erased from the recent musical adaptation.) Again, both novels link the multiplot form to the problem of representing American culture’s racial, ethnic, and cultural mix.

But the link to Ragtime extends beyond the formal similarities, and not just because one of The March’s minor characters is Coalhouse Walker, Sr. In Ragtime’s conclusion, Tateh--now self-transformed into Baron Ashkenazy, married to the very WASP Mother, and in charge of Coalhouse Walker, Jr.’s son--imagines what are clearly the “Our Gang” films: “A bunch of children who were pals, white black, fat thin, rich poor, all kinds, mischievous little urchins who would have funny adventures in their own neighborhood, a society of ragamuffins, like all of us, a gang, getting into trouble and getting out again” [2]. Doctorow wryly undercuts Tateh’s optimistic, cinematic vision of the American melting pot, but it’s nevertheless the case that Tateh represents, in a small way, the immigrant’s American Dream made real. Similarly, The March concludes with Stephen Walsh, an Irish Union soldier, imagining his own idealized future with Pearl, daughter of a plantation owner and a slave. While Pearl offers up a series of worries both pragmatic (unlike her, her children may not be able to “pass”) and existential (“If I live white, how free am I?” [362]), Stephen confidently argues that “You will have to let the world catch up to you” (362). In playing off present compromise against future liberation, Stephen imagines a utopia of racial equality that will be conspicuously missing from Ragtime—a novel in which things have still not “caught up.”

As it happens, the process of Tateh’s grandiose self-invention dominates The March. Yet Tateh’s performance takes on a new meaning here, for the war fractures identities as much as it fractures the country. The characters change shape in order to survive, but they have little choice in the matter: the very ground of their earlier existence has melted into air. Pearl, for example, not only passes for white, but also temporarily passes as a drummer boy. Emily Thompson, initially proud of her standing as “Georgia Supreme Court Justice Horace Thompson’s daughter” (24), winds up working as a Union army nurse. Sherman constantly needs public adulation to assuage his internal demons, and does his best to project an image of “gallantry” when required (115). And, in the novel’s most extended example of black humor, two Confederate soldiers on the make, Arly and Will, rapidly change sides and occupations—all culminating in Arly’s theft of a photographer’s identity. As Calvin Harper, the photographer’s black assistant, notes, “He [Arly] was like an actor in the theater where the costume you wear is the person you are” (302). Harper’s simile unintentionally highlights something important: the characters are frequently and uncomfortably aware that they are acting, that their new “role” is not them. Thus, Pearl frequently ruminates on passing as just a new form of slavery, while Emily finally abandons the army once she realizes that she has betrayed herself in her pursuit of the doctor, Wrede Sartorius.

Two minor characters, however, embody the extremes of the war’s effects on individual identity and, by extension, national identity. At the one extreme lies Albion Simms, “physically unimpaired but for an iron spike in the skull” (269), who suffers from near-total amnesia. An increasingly empty vessel, Simms exists in an eternal present: “It’s always now, he said. It’s always now” (274). While the novel’s shapeshifters remake themselves in order to stave off the threat of death, consciously or unconsciously, Simms is unable to conceptualize a “self,” let alone futurity or consequences. Sherman admits to himself that “[i]t is in fear of my own death, whatever it is, that I would wrest immortality from the killing war I wage” (90), but Simms’ own suicide (intentional or not) is terribly bereft of meaning or historical value.

But where Simms empties out, Abraham Lincoln seems just as horribly full:

…Perhaps his agony was where his public and private beings converged. Wrede lingered on the dock. The moral capacity of the President made it difficult to be in his company. To explain how bad he looked, the public care on his brow, you would have to account for more than an inherited syndrome. A proper diagnosis was not in the realm of science. His affliction might, after all, be the wounds of the war he’d gathered into himself, the amassed miseries of this torn-apart country made incarnate. (335)

Sartorius—and, it seems, Doctorow—sees Lincoln as a secular Man of Sorrows, his pain-wracked mind the necessary sacrifice to redeem the shattered nation. Although we need to bear in mind that we perceive Lincoln through Sartorius’ POV, it’s nevertheless significant that, in this reading, Lincoln is the only character to consciously embrace suffering [3]. Unlike Simms, obliterated into virtual unconsciousness, Lincoln seeks out and takes on the full measure of the country’s pain. Moreover, Doctorow repeatedly removes Lincoln from the realm of performance: Calvin Harper remembers that, according to Josiah Culp, Lincoln is not one of those “famous people who think that they are not getting enough of the world’s attention” (307), and Sartorius angrily tells a group of helpless physicians that Lincoln “does not need an audience for his death” (351). In identifying himself with his country’s agony, Lincoln—unlike Sherman—seeks not his own immortality, but that of the nation.

[1] But see Benjamin Lawson, Rereading the Revolution: The Turn-Of-The-Century American Revolutionary War Novel (Bowling Green, OH: Popular Press, 2000) for the state of affairs at the beginning of the twentieth century.
[2] E. L. Doctorow, Ragtime (1974; New York: Plume, 1996), 269-70.
[3] Like Vidal, who includes only one scene from Lincoln’s POV, Doctorow keeps us out of the President’s head.

The Human Angle
by Daniel Green

It is perhaps now a little hard to comprehend just how unsettling E. L. Doctorow's Ragtime seemed at the time of its publication (1975). Not exactly a historical novel--it seems designed to question the very utility of historical "fact" in our consideration of the past--it nevertheless produces a vivid if subjective rendition of the ragtime era by juxtaposing purely fictional characters with actual historical figures who are in turn treated as if they were fictional characters. Considerable liberty is taken with the historical record, and the result is a novel that not only fictionalizes history but suggests that, as far as the novelist is concerned, history might just as well be fiction. Whereas much of the self-reflexive, "postmodern" fiction of the time called attention to the artifice of fiction-making in order to reinforce the separation of fiction and reality, Ragtime seemed to propose that, for the literary imagination, the two realms are really quite permeable. (Robert Coover's The Public Burning would do the same thing two years later.)

Doctorow's undercutting of the reality/fiction divide has proven to be very influential, to the point that we are no longer much taken aback when a writer injects apparent "fact" into what is otherwise called a fiction--even putative facts about the author him/herself, as in Ellis's Lunar Park or Harry Mathews's My Life in CIA, in which "Brett Easton Ellis" and "Harry Mathews" are the "fictional" protagonists. Nor are we particularly struck by historical fictions that are not merely set in the past or attempt to recreate periods in the past, but use historical personages as "characters." Doctorow himself went on to write other novels more or less in this mode, such as World's Fair and Billy Bathgate, but eventually he has come to seem more interested in simply re-creating the past through what are finally the usual conventions of historical fiction.

The March, Doctorow's latest novel, is cut comfortably from these conventional patterns. Although the novel presumes to depict William Tecumseh Sherman in ways that must at times extrapolate from the historical record--what was Sherman thinking at this precise moment during his infamous March to the Sea?--it is otherwise a fairly straightforward account of his march through Georgia and the Carolinas. Although the narrative shifts kaleidoscopically among various groups of characters participating in the march, this is ultimately just a way of giving the story a properly comprehensive sense of historical realism. All of the characters portrayed in the novel are no doubt representative of the cross-section of human types involved in this important historical event.

In his review of The March, John Freeman perhaps gets at the heart of what Doctorow is trying to accomplish: "While the details of Sherman's lethal procession are well-known today, time seems to have forgotten the human angle. Sure, property was destroyed, but how were the Union troops greeted? Did they proceed with guilt? Did they pause before burning cities to the ground? Did the recently emancipated slaves really believe this fire-breathing beast was their conductor to the Promised Land?" Providing the "human angle" on Sherman's march would seem to be the novel's primary goal, answering these and many other questions that can't necessarily be resolved simply by consulting the history books. It is itself an attempt to become a history book one might ultimately consult along with all the others for that "human" touch only it can offer.

And in its way, The March achieves this goal reasonably well. It's readable enough, its fragmentary form realized with the skill one would expect of a writer of Doctorow's caliber, its characters lively enough to sustain interest over the course of a novel featuring such a large cast, although not all of the characters resist becoming merely illustrative of the category--freed slave, disillusioned plantation wife, irascible Rebel soldier--their presence is meant to personify. Perhaps it is true, as Walter Kirn says in his review of the novel, that "When the subject is as large and old as war, the pursuit of pristine originality can thin a story down to nothing" and that "To get through such tales aesthetically unscathed is a finicky, slightly cowardly objective that works against basic honesty and passion," but I, for one, find some of these portrayals to be only a few cuts above what is to be found in Gone With the Wind and especially found the novel's conclusion--in which the feisty mulatto Pearl and the Irish infantryman Stephen Walsh ride off to a life together in New York, a life in which they will presumably overcome the obvious obstacles to such a match as existed in 1865 and after--to be patently sentimental, a transparent attempt to leave us with a little democratic idealism to leaven the story of violence and destruction.

Putting aside its flaws in execution, however, I am most disappointed in The March because it does nothing to provoke me out of my indifference toward historical fiction that simply tries to "bring history to life." One can accept the axiom that such fiction is always finally about the present as much as the past--in The March, about the origins of our continuing racial conflicts, about recovery from a great national trauma--and still think that this novel at best rehearses platitudes but otherwise does very little to alter our understanding either of the Civil War or of the lingering issues whose lack of resolution has plagued American life since then. I could easily warm up to a kind of historical fiction that either upsets our established notions about historical subjects or that questions accepted practices of historical representation (as did Ragtime). Unfortunately, The March does neither. Perhaps in the long run it adds something of marginal interest to a consideration of the Doctorow oeuvre (especially by those more interested in history than in literature), but since Doctorow's sociopolitical thematic concerns are by now quite well known, the appearance of this novel seems to me, at least, mostly superfluous.

11/17/2005

Formal patterning has always been a predominant feature of Richard Powers's fiction. Powers doesn't so much tell stories (although his fiction has plenty of narrative power) as allow them to emerge from the interplay of buried forces, illustrated most fundamentally, perhaps, by the DNA molecule, the quest for the stucture of which is dramatized in The Gold-Bug Variation (and in turn is associated with the formal patterning of music, represented by J.S. Bach's use of counterpoint.) Typically a Powers novel connects two narrative "strands" together in such a way that the result--the novel itself--exceeds the effects each story might have produced separately, creating something "new." (Gain, for example, poses the story of a woman fighting ovarian cancer against the history of the company that very likely produced the fertilizer that caused the cancer, offering up a more complex perspective on the depicted events in the process; Plowing the Dark accomplishes the same effect by juxtaposing the development of an advanced version of virtual reality with the plight of a man taken hostage in Lebanon, who has, of course, only the "virtual" reality he can summon up inside his head.)

The Time of Our Singing is every bit as ambitious as Powers's previous novels in its themes (history, the nature of time itself), but in this case his treatment of these themes is at least as heavy-handed as the themes are profound. It's not that Powers lacks insight or sensitivity in his approach to the novel's most incendiary theme--race--but his insights seem too explicitly telegraphed, the formal patterning and its suggestiveness too pat. I agree with Sven Birkerts: ". . .Powers also wants to fathom the root brutalities of race, and at this he is less successful. If he has always fallen short in the presentation of viscerally compelling characters (his are too often fleshed-out tendencies, personalities conveniently narrowed around their obsessions), he has generally compensated with the intricacy of his designs and with sentences rich in ideas. But his previous subjects. . .lent themselves more readily to his formalism." The Time of Our Singing either points up the limitations of Powers's kind of formalism, or it reveals Powers's ambitions in this instance to be leading him in a direction not well-suited to his strengths as a novelist. Or both.

To say that Powers "has always fallen short in the presentation of viscerally compelling characters" is to say only that he has attempted to exploit the possibilities of fiction in a way that doesn't rely on "viscerally compelling characters" to engage the reader's interest. He wants the reader to involve him/herself in the "intricacy" of design, to find in the tracing out of the incremental, spiralling pattern a source of interest at least as compelling as character identification, if not more so, since Powers's novels make it clear that the writer's job is not merely to tell stories and evoke characters, but to use such things as story and character to make something fresh from the form, to find the means to unite story, character, and theme with form in a way that is mutually reinforcing: character is tied to the evolving revelations of form, formal ingenuity itself embodies and discloses theme. It is said that Powers is a novelist interested in "ideas," especially scientific ideas, but even here Powers uses science--in The Time of Our Singing, quantum physics--to help construct formal patterns that, while illustrative of the ideas and their implications, are also themselves aesthetically provocative.

But in The Time of Our Singing, Powers seems to want his overlapping episodes and cross-narrative echoes to do more than reverberate with implied or suggestive meaning. He wants his complex construction to carry a heavy thematic load indeed, no less than the racial history of the United States in the twentieth century. He wants to sum up that history through his emblematic characters (a pair of biracial brothers attempting to make it the all-white world of classical music) and his narrative stops at key events in postwar history (the Emmett Till murder, the 60s riots, the Million Man March). He wants the novel to dramatize the intractability of racial attitudes, the consequences of struggling with those attitudes (or, in the case of one of the brothers, Jonah, depicted in the novel as a musical prodigy of gargantuan proportions, of attempting to avoid them), the fate of idealism in such a morally compromised country as the United States. These themes come off as, at best, obvious, if anything even more banal because of the elaborate structure supporting them; it's a needlessly labored way of proffering "ideas" that don't require such circuitous treatment.

In my opinion, the most intriguing theme Powers pursues in this novel is the putative conflict between high art (as represented by Western classical music) and folk or popular art (as represented by various forms of African-American music). Is Jonah guilty of betraying his race by attempting to distinguish himself as a singer of the white man's music, or is he demonstrating that serious art is beyond race? But I have to say that, at best, Powers equivocates on the matter. On the one hand, Jonah's musical performances are almost always described in a rapturous manner (over the course of a 630-page novel, this actually become rather tiresome), as if he had indeed found himself in a realm that denies cultural markers. On the other, Jonah acquires a tinge of moral dishonor that he never really loses. That he dies of injuries sustained during the Los Angeles riots unavoidably implies he only gets what is coming to him. There is finally a tone of political correctness in Powers's portrayal of these matters that sounds some disappointingly flat notes.

On the other hand, I cannot agree with Daniel Mendelsohn, who in his review of the novel writes that Powers's "weakness as a writer is the weakness of all conceptual artists: you may admire his elaborate installations, but you sometimes find yourself missing the simple pleasures of good old-fashioned painting. (Beautiful brushwork, for one: Powers has never been a writer of lovely sentences. . . ." If Mendelsohn means by "lovely sentences" the kind of safe, pseudo-poetic figurative language that passes for "good writing" in too much literary fiction, then I would agree that Powers's prose is not "lovely." But if Mendelsohn is suggesting that Powers has no prose style, that he sacrifices language to the contrivances of his "elaborate installations," then I have to say that Mendelsohn is not reading Richard Powers very attentively. Take, for instance this remarkable bit of Cubistic prose::

"My brother's face was a school of fishes. His grin was not one thing, but a hundred darting ones. I have a photograph--one of the few from my childhood that escaped incineration. In it, the two of us open Christmas presents on the nubby floral-print sofa that sat in our front room. His eyes look everywhere at once; at his own present, a three-segment expanding telescope; at mine, a metronome; at Rootie, who clutches his knee, wanting to see for herself; at our photographing father deep in his act of stopping time; at Mama, just past the picture's frame; at a future audience, looking, from a century on, at this sheltered Christmas creche, long after all of us are dead."

Or this passage, evoking the narrator's struggle to understand his own musical experience:

"The game was leverage, control. Speed and span, how to crack open the intervals, widen them from on high, raise the body's focus from finger into arm, lengthen the arm like a hawk on the wing. I'd coat the line in rubato, or tie every note into a legato flow. I'd round the phrase or clip it, then pedal the envelope and let it ring. I'd turn the baby grand into a two-manual harpsichord. Play, stop, lift, rewind, repeat, stop, lift, back a line, back a phrase, back two bars, half a bar, the turn, the transition, the note, the thinnest edge of attack. My brain sank into states of perfect tedium laced with intense thrill. I was a plant extracting petals from sunlight, water wearing away a continent's coast."

Powers's prose style may not be conventionally "lovely," but its rough spots are part of what makes it compelling. It has an exuberance, a headlong rush of energy, of determination to describe as vividly as possible the phenomena under scrutiny, that makes most workshop-derived "loveliness" seem dessicated in comparison. Powers provides plenty of arresting images--"My brother's face was a school of fishes," "a plant extracting petals from sunlight"--but his prose is distinctive for its stop-start rhythm, its unrestrained alliteration, its use of lists and various kinds of cumulative phrasing.

It is precisely his style, his immersion in language, combined with his formal imagination, that has made me an admirer of Richard Powers's fiction. Unfortunately, in The Time of Our Singing (as he also did in Operation Wandering Soul), Powers too tightly harnesses both style and form to the exposition of "theme" in a manner that is much too earnest for my taste.

11/16/2005

Self-Styled Sirenquotes a professional film critic about the impact of blogs: "I have no idea what is going to happen with the...review biz. The Web has created this false sense of authority, in which everyone believes his or her opinion is equally valid. Witness blogs. Witness the e-mail I get, in which my correspondents rip me a new one each day."

SSS observes:

. . .the Amazon and IMDB comments pages, and blogs, enable some badly educated and tasteless people to give an inflated rating to their own opinions. It's difficult to argue with that. While some people in those forums write from a careful consideration of what they have read or seen before, others rant, ramble and cannot even bother with spell check. There is a definite streak of anti-intellectualism in the anti-critic school of thought, too. Critics are snobs, rage the IMDB chatboards. What do they know? I'd rather listen to someone just like me.

Some critics, however, have devalued themselves. The movie studios get sycophantic, third-rate members of the press to write "HANG ONTO YOUR SEATS!" or some such about their latest ghastly shoot-'em-up, and after a while even the word of a writer for a major daily carries a great deal less weight.

It is true that not everyone's opinion is equally valid--but this means only that not everyone bothers to support his/her opinion with equal weight. Simply writing for a newspaper does not in itself convey a "true" authority to the critic, if the views expressed do not go beyond plot summaries and vapid opinionizing. Speaking for myself, I don't find much critical weight in the opinions--about either film or books--expressed in most of the "major dailies" The amount of space given over to reviews is much too sparse to allow for much real criticism of any kind, and, if anything, SSS understates the extent to which film and book reviewers have become appendages of their respective "industries."

We can only hope that blogs don't succumb to the same temptations to sycophancy. If litblogs become just another opportunity for publishers to hawk their wares, as Dennis Johnson fears might be happening, a real opportunity to provide a critical alternative to the media powers-that-be--to rip them a new one indeed--will have been lost.

11/10/2005

I have discontinued my secondary weblog, Outside the Text. I started this blog as a way to vent some political views and opinions and thus avoid cluttering up The Reading Experience with posts unrelated to literature and literary criticism. But as I now find myself posting fairly often on such topics as film, music, and "art" more generally defined, I see no reason to confine political or politically-inclined entries to a separate blog. (Although I don't anticipate posting that often on politics. One of the reasons I am deleting Outside the Text is that I have found very few occasions to update it in the last several months. Most likely, future posts on political topics at TRE will concentrate on political books and perhaps political philosophy.)

In looking over the posts I did put up at Outside the Text, I concluded there was really only one that I would want to preserve in at least archival form. Thus I am here reposting the following discussion of Paul Berman's Terror and Liberalism, which was in fact the first post to appear at OTT.

Distinctions and Differences

Paul Berman's Terror and Liberalism masquerades as a book by a liberal attempting to save liberalism from itself. It is not such a book; its ostensible argument is, at best, overwrought, at worst made in bad faith. Berman is no liberal, and his exhortations that we view the "war on terror" as essentially another fight against a totalitarian ideology seeking to do us in has virtually nothing to do with liberalism.

The bad faith is shamelessly evident in the book's very first chapter. Playing off of every good liberal's revulsion upon hearing the very name "Richard Nixon," Berman presents his own hawkish views on fighting terrorism and the wisdom of invading Iraq by contrasting them with Nixon's right-wing foreign-policy realism: After describing an op-ed piece he had written supporting the first Iraq war, Berman further notes his regret that "afterward, having had my say, I didn't bother spelling out the further implications of my argument--the larger differences between Nixon's 'realism' and my sort of liberalism or leftism, between Nixonian war and anti-totalitarian war." Terror and Liberalism is, of course the belated "spelling out" of those implications, but readers of the book should beware of Berman's invocation of Nixon-as-bogeyman. The disagreements between Berman and Nixon over the role the United States should play in dealing with the Middle East and the Islamic world more broadly are really just distinctions without a difference. As far as I can tell, had Paul Berman been President after the events of 9-11-01, the actions taken by his administration would have diverged very little from those actually taken by G.W. Bush. Berman's "anti-totalitarian war" would have gotten us into the very same calamity in the center of which we now find ourselves in Iraq.

We hear from Berman the same arguments and assertions we have heard from the neocons responsible for the calamity: the fulminations against the effete Europeans who refused to "lift a finger" against the rising terrorist threats; against the ineffectual United Nations, "incapable of doing anything forceful" in Bosnia or Kosovo; the same crowing over the supposed "liberation" of Afghanistan and all of those wonderful things we supposedly did for ordinary Afghans and for Afghan women; the same fixation on "jihadi warriors waving scimitars at the Zionist-Crusader conspiracy"; the same invocation of the likes of Bernard Lewis on the democratic fruits of "regime change" in Iraq and Iran. We even get this bouquet tossed at the feet of George W. Bush, whom Berman has lately professed to despise: "Some other president might have dithered, or might have contented himself with lobbing missles into Afghanistan for two or three days, praying for a bull's-eye. But Bush put together a fairly enormous force, convened allies and coalition partners, appeased or intimidated or seduced possible enemies, and launched an invasion which, as in any war, caused many terrible events--but few of the mass-scale calamites that so many people had dreaded."

Berman's central contention--that the war on Islamist terrorism is a new front in the larger war on totalitarianism that has been going on for all of the twentieth century--just won't stand up. Both fascism and communism may have induced a kind of religious feeling among their followers, but they were merely substitutes for religion, secular expressions of communal solidarity. Islamism is religion. I still think Richard Dawkins's immediate response to 9-11 and the motives of those reponsible is the simplest and thus most accurate diagnosis:

It's a tall story, but worth a try. You'd have to get them young, though. Feed them a complete and self-consistent background mythology to make the big lie sound plausible when it comes. Give them a holy book and make them learn it by heart. Do you know, I really think it might work. As luck would have it, we have just the thing to hand: a ready-made system of mind-control which has been honed over centuries, handed down through generations. Millions of people have been brought up in it. It is called religion and, for reasons which one day we may understand, most people fall for it (nowhere more so than America itself, though the irony passes unnoticed). Now all we need is to round up a few of these faith-heads and give them flying lessons.

Berman claims to be seeking an explanation that takes religion into account in his lengthy analysis of the writings (only partially available) of the Islamist scholar Sayyid Qutb. Many contemporaneous reviews of Terror and Liberalism marveled over Berman's "study" of Qutb, but I don't find it particularly impressive. Berman discovered in Qutb's writing what he set out to discover: confirmation that people like Qutb are really totalitarian agents of a familiar kind, inspired as much by Western thought (Marx, Christian theology, Western science), or at least by a visceral response to Western thought (anti-pragmatism), as by the Koran. The fact that Qutb's zealotry is of a kind shared by all religious zealots, the belief that religion provides the only true explanation of human reality, and that one's own religion in particular is the one true religion and road to salvation, is almost entirely elided.

What really comes across most unmistakably in Berman's discussion of Qutb is Berman's own not so grudging respect, even admiration, for Qutb's sincerity and clarity of thought. Berman obviously thinks that Qutb himself believed what he said and that ultimately he considered his work to be in the best interests of mankind. More than that, Berman also seems to believe that Qutb's analysis is at least partially correct (especially the anti-pragmatism), even if those in the Islamic world who accept this analysis are being led to take actions that are destructive to us freedom-loving people in the West. And in this Berman is being entirely consistent with a tradition of "radical" thinking that, as much as it claims to value freedom and democracy, really finds in the thought of ideologues of all kinds an echo of its own moralism and ideological certainty. Radicals of this kind finally can't settle for mere democratic freedom of the more mundane kind, the merely tolerant and watchful kind, but seemingly must have it transformed into a crusade to be carried out through their own kind of zealotry.

Moreover, these radicals finally have nothing but contempt for liberalism, however much they are mistakenly associated with it. Indeed, radicalism (of both the left and right) despises liberalism most of all. At its best, liberalism's prudence and modesty, its meliorism, always present an obstacle to the totalizing projects of authoritarians on both sides, and thus, in my view, twentieth century political history is really the history of radicals on the left and right struggling to remove this obstacle. The anti-liberal impulse can especially be seen in the stories of those radicals, from Dos Passos to Podhoretz to Horowitz to Hitchens and now to Paul Berman ,who move from the left to the right, bypassing liberalism almost altogether to become conservatives who rail against "the liberals" in the same way they once denounced them from the left. Berman does not yet offer himself as a conservative in this reformed tradition, but, judging from Terror and Liberalism, it would not surprise me if, a few years down the road, Berman fully emerges as a "liberal" apostate whose books and appearances on Fox News bring us yet more loud and insistent vilifications of "the left."

And indeed Berman has nothing but scorn for contemporary liberalism and its general worldview. Liberals engage in "wishful thinking." They are insufficiently resolute in fighting suicide terrorism (too accepting of the Palestinian cause in general). They foolishly believe that the bin Laden warriors are deprived, acting out of legitimate grievances. They even more foolishly believe that bin Ladenism itself might be rooted out through "policing." They laughably think that "a democratic and free society ought to be generous, open-minded, tolerant, fair--and peacable." They irresponsibly put too much faith in "blue-helmeted UN peacekeepers."

In a kind of summary statement about these incurable liberals, Berman tells us:

The language of international accords, of human rights and humanitarianism, of "Europe," of civilization and the United Nations--this language, the modest rhetoric of 1989. turned out to be hopelessly ambiguous: a language of action that was all too easily converted into a language of inaction; a language that people could wear like an armband to show they were morally committed, when, in reality, they were thinking of dinner all along: an idealistic language that was also a cynical language.

If this was "cynical" language, then more power to the cynics! What has Paul Berman's own idealist, non-cynical, neo-Wilsonian talk gotten us? 2,000 dead soldiers in Iraq, 50, 000 wounded, numerous civilians killed by terrorists and kidnappers whose presence in Iraq was made possible by our own actions and have made the country much more frightful as a terrorist haven than Afghanistan ever was, casualties among Iraqi civilians of 100,000 or more.

What's finally most frightening about Paul Berman's own brand of "radical" idealism is how easily it seems to accomodate all of this carnage. That so many people, not just the soldiers but their families, not just Americans, but also Iraquis, have to suffer for his idealism is really just repulsive beyond expression. When did the preference for liberal democracy become simply another violent revolutionary movement the success of which depends upon the death and immiseration of other people, even truly innocent people who unfortunately have to become collateral damage? (And that those whose idealism is being put into action themselves most often don't have to endanger even their talk-show hairdos makes their idealism, and this book, only a hundred times more repellent.) When did liberalism itself become hostage to this sickening notion that liberals must join in with such death-dealing or become labelled the enemies of freedom?

Unfortunately, Berman doesn't seem the type to learn from his mistakes. His certainties seem pretty certain, and I doubt that even the mayhem that has been perpetrated on Iraq for over two years now--and even the utter lack of anything to show for it--will do much to convince him he ought to rethink the way in which his book participates in this mayhem. Undoubtedly he'll blame the Bush administration for failing to execute the whole sordid exercise efficiently: even more troops should have been sent to be killed and maimed, we didn't cozy up to exactly the right corrupt "exiles" or Sadaam wannabes, etc. It's unlikely he'll conclude that maybe the liberals his book derides had it right after all. Thus, the best thing for such liberals to do with Berman's book is to suggest to him he find the appropriate home for it in the appropriate bodily orifice.

11/08/2005

. . .[Bob Dylan's "Hurricane" is] a campaigning song, set in the real world. If you say that it doesn’t matter what the song is about, or whether it’s true or not, and that it’s just great music, then I think you’ve missed a lot of the point of the song. You aestheticise it. You turn it into an artefact detached from real life. That impulse reminds me very much of the American ‘New Criticism’ of the 1950s. The New Critics wanted to remove literature from life and history and regard writing as exclusively a formal structure – a well-wrought urn, an organic artefact, where all you discussed was language. The New Critics rubbished biography. The writer’s life, the writer’s intentions, were an irrelevance. Out with society and history, just stick to the words! But theory is never innocent, and the New Criticism slotted in nicely with the quietism of the age. If you don’t want to talk about history or society, you threaten nothing.

Heaven forbid that we "aestheticize" an ostensible work of art! Sharp's admonitions here are like saying that the stories in today's newspaper are too much like journalism or that the trouble with physics is that it contains too many darn equations. Reattach them to life! But just as physics no longer exists without the equations, art must be "aesthetic" in order to be itself in the first place. It's the attempt to politicize works of art, to make them illuminate history or act as the servants of biography, that distorts them, not regarding them as artifact--which of course they are, first and foremost. If we don't "aestheticize" art--that is, apprehend it on its own terms as art--we've failed to recognize it at all.

What in the world could it mean to say that in calling a song "great music" you’ve "missed a lot of the point of the song"? That music is something other than musical? That it's more than music? The impulse behind such a claim is understandable--it's a way of saying that something profoundly important has occured in one's experience of "great" art of any kind--but to suggest that the "point" of a song or a poem or a novel lies elsewhere than in its embodiment as a song or poem or novel is to implicitly denigrate the form a particular work has taken: Don't tell me this song is musically satisfying--it's trying to change the world! That novel is pleasant, but it's "merely literary." Implicitly, such assertions tell us that musicians and novelists could be finding better uses for their time than just composing music or writing novels. They could be "campaigning."

Sharp's account of New Criticism is a fairly typical sort of misrepresentation among those who are apparently more interested in "society and history" than in literature. This kind of reductive description has especially been used for quite some time now by academics eager to rid the study of literature of all vestiges of formalism in favor of "cultural critique." But the New Critics never wanted "to remove literature from life and history." It's very hard to see how this could be done in the first place--if it were to be removed from life, where would it go?--but at any rate the New Critics wanted precisely to locate literature in history--its history as literature--and provide it with "life" by identifying those characteristics particular to it, or at least particular to the experience of reading it. It's not as if the "formal structures" with which New Criticism was concerned were already well-known, waiting to be pinned to works of literature in some act of literary preservation. For the New Critics, reading was a dynamic process, a dramatic process, during which judgment needed to be suspended. Formal structures remind us that a poem or story is not like "talk." They have been shaped in such a way that a work's "content" is not that easy to determine. Thus the New Critics' use of such terms as "ambiguity" and "paradox."

Sharp then reprimands Vladimir Nabokov for observing that a particular passage from Dickens's Bleak House is "a lesson in style, not in participative emotion." Sharp continues:

Bleak House is not simply a literary artefact. It powerfully expresses Dickens’s own seething rage and contempt for a supposedly Christian society where children died openly in the London streets. Bleak House projects Dickens’s vision of England as a rotten and corrupt society.

In my view, that Bleak House might express Dickens's "rage and contempt" is not necessarily one of its admirable qualities. Fortunately, what Dickens really did in this novel--perhaps more effectively than any of his other books--was to transcend his rage and contempt and to translate them (if indeed they were feelings he held) into literary art, into a novel that is indeed fully shaped and ingeniously structured. And so what if the novel "projects Dickens’s vision of England as a rotten and corrupt society"? Such visions are a dime a dozen. The only thing that distinguishes Dickens's "vision" is that it served as the impetus for a series of great fictions. Nabokov was right: What makes Dickens still a writer well worth reading are his specifically literary gifts, his ability to create singularly memorable characters, his prodigious prose style.

Returning to his discussion of Dylan, Sharp concludes: "Pop music self-evidently has dimensions that poetry lacks (the human voice, the backing music, the individuality of every performance, its immediate visceral impact) but I don’t see why that should prevent us discussing that aspect which they both share: words." I'll avoid debating the merits of analyzing pop songs as if they were poems (one could view song lyrics as poems of a sort, although comparing them to actual poems is, in my view, unfair to both, since they weren't written to be poems), but suffice it to say that Sharp eliminates almost everything that defines song as a form of music ("the human voice," "the backing music"), further reducing both songwriting and poetry to "[w]hat the two art forms have in common[, which] is a desire to communicate something, usually an experience, through words." Never mind that in Dylan's most creative period in the mid-1960s he focused more on "communicating" an experience through expanded musical means, the lyrics often acting as a kind of hypnotic accompaniment to the music rather than the opposite. In confining the artist's ambitions to "a desire to communicate something," Sharp strips art of its very identity, equating it with any other act of communication and limiting it to what it "is about." Discouraging such an approach to art and literature was what New Criticism, in all of its quietism, was itself finally all about.

11/03/2005

I agree with Olen Steinhauer that "capital-L Literature could be created from the tools of the thriller." (Perhaps we could just drop the "capital-L" and say instead that the thriller, or any any genre, is perfectly able to achieve "literary" status when in the hands of a good writer.) I also admire his honesty in admitting that "the subject of literary ambition, or more specifically, literary quality, is a hot-button topic, particularly in the world of genre writing. There's a deep-seated insecurity among genre writers, an insecurity I share."

It is surely the case that in the periodic skirmishes between the partisans of genre fiction and those of literary fiction the former are at least as likely to fire the first shots, attacking the former for their snobbery, their failure to recognize that so-called literary fiction is just as dependent on convention as any form of genre writing. As Steinhauer suggests, such defensiveness does seem to reveal a certain insecurity, however "deep-seated." It should be clear enough by now that "literary" writers have long abandoned a similar disdain for the conventions of genre fiction. Elements of SF and detective fiction abound in much contemporary fiction, especially among writers thought of as "experimental." (Writers like Thomas Berger or Robert Coover love to play around with these conventions, and who would consider Jonathem Lethem or Michael Chabon to be hostile to genre?)

But if Steinhauer and other genre writers really want to produce "great art," they're going to have to get beyond the assumptions about what makes great art not just great but "art" to begin with that are revealed in this post. "Bad art is distracting without being provocative," he writes. "It tells us things we already know, and know consciously." Presumably "good art" would do the opposite. It would "provoke" by telling us what we don't know. But only bad art "tells us things" in the first place. Good art does indeed provoke, but it does so by providing us with a disinctive kind of experience, not by "telling," by "saying something." And what art offers is not knowledge--either direct or implict--but an enhanced appreciation of what it means to be aesthetically "provoked."

Steinhauer continues in this line of thinking when he asserts that "Art that reinforces what's already fully accepted by the mainstream of our society is either bad art or propaganda. . .Sometimes the distinction is confusing, because bad art can be masked in wonderful prose, great acting or cinematography (see Leni Riefenstahl). But we have to see beyond this and ask what it's revealing to us." Again, one can only presume that, in Steinhauer's view, "wonderful prose, great acting or cinematography" becomes "art" only when it does not reinscribe "what's already fully accepted by the mainstream of our society." Art has to do not with a superior use of the medium in question--written language, film--but with the "message" the medium might convey in its own particular way.

Steinhauer is on firmer ground when he concludes that "Power is what it's about. Good and great art have the power to transform in some way." I would agree that an aesthetic experience involves sensing the "power" of good/great art, and even that a form of transformation is involved. No doubt for many, such transformation does mean "transforming how you look at existence, how you look at your life." But no art is going to provoke this kind of change if it simply seeks to affect beliefs and attitudes through making "statements." The power of the aesthetic, at its most compelling, strengthens our powers of perception, enriches our sense of what it means to be alive.

Genre fiction ought to be just as capable of expressing such power as literary fiction. But it doesn't come from any particular sort of plot or any specific way of creating character or through pursuing the right kind of important theme. It occurs when the artist disregards the imperative to "communicate" altogether and focuses instead on the ways in which his/her medium and its formal possibilities can be explored and expanded. When the integrity of the artist's creation is more highly prized than whatever it might be supposed to "tell" us. Ultimately, powerful art communicates nothing, but it is a "nothing" that is also everything.

11/01/2005

In his essay "Love and Hatred of 'French Theory' in America," Rolando Perez provides this very incisive account of the reception of Theory in the 1980s:

Those of us who were either in the U.S. academy as professors or as graduate students in the early 1980s were weaned on the milk of post-existentialist, French thought. For reasons that had little or nothing to with the individual thinkers behind the different theories, two camps formed all on their own. Or perhaps more accurately, according to the academic interests of the people involved. Those whose interests were primarily literary were attracted to, studied, and wrote on Barthes, Derrida, Jabes, de Man, etc. Much of what we think of as being "French theory" today is the result of the kind of literary criticism that was carried out in prestigious universities like Yale during the 1980s. Academicians and graduate students who were interested in Continental political philosophy found in Foucault, Deleuze, Guattari, Lyotard, and Baudrillard, the necessary keys they needed to critique contemporary, American capitalist society. Some of us attempted to bring these two strains of French thought together, either from the literary or from the political end. And there were good reasons for such attempts, even if at times the actual results were less than satisfactory.

He continues:

Certainly there were things to criticize in what came to be known as postmodern French theory. There were people who were churning out deconstructive readings of just about everything under the sun, and doing it quite badly: building careers, amassing publications for tenure, and saying nothing. And the same could be said of all the Deleuzean articles that made it to the pages of so many publications. Yet few would deny today the importance of contemporary French thought on American letters. Up until what some have called the "French invasion" of academia, American literary criticism was at a stand still, and Continental philosophy was merely what was left of the exhausted, no longer relevant post-war philosophy of phenomenology and existentialism. What French Theory in America and Hatred of Capitalism do is to show us in an eloquent manner what French thought has contributed, and continues to contribute, to academia and the art world.

Although I can certainly see how an endeavor like "Continental philosophy" might at a given time be "exhausted," in need of fresh insights and an altered focus, I find it harder to agree that "literary criticism was at a stand still." How could literary criticism--considered as a practice, not as a theory about practice--be at a "stand still"? Unless the term has come to mean only theory about practice, and the actual practice of explicating and evaluating texts is something else, something about which academe no longer concerns itself?

The latter kind of criticism doesn't need to be "advanced," its assumptions "updated." Explication is explication. The process of moving from consideration of textual features to an evaluation of the text's success in accomplishing its implicit purpose remains the same. Certainly insights garnered from a familiarity with theory or another critic's method might be brought to bear in a particular instance, but this will provide a new perspective on the individual work at hand, not on the practice of literary criticism per se. The new perspective has been produced by the application of an unchanging principle--read the text as intensively as one can, come to a conclusion based on an assessment of ends and means.

Developments over the past twenty-five years have produced a conception of "literary criticism" by which the object of criticism is no longer the literary work itself but the operations of criticism. The very notion of the "literary" is interrogated and competing notions of "value" are debated. These are perfectly acceptable things to do, but they have become the defining characteristics of literary criticism, not the appraisal of works of fiction and poetry per se, at least insofar as the very term "criticism" has become synonymous with "academic criticism"--which I would argue has certainly happened. The debate over Theory is often framed as a conflict between the "higher eclecticism" John Holbo writes about and a more respectful appreciation of literature itself, but it would be more precise to say that one distinctive practice--literary criticism--has been replaced by another--theoretical speculation, with literature as its prompt.

I am not arguing that such speculation should not be carried out. Even if I did believe that (I don't), no amount of complaining by the advocates of "literature itself" is going to return us to the days when Literature was the disciplinary main attraction, the "literary" scholar its curator. For whatever reason, studying literature for its own sake has proven to be an unsuitable activity in the contemporary university. I do wonder, however, why the term "literary criticism" continues to be used in describing what academic scholars are now doing in most literature departments. Surely it isn't necessary to retain it for purposes of prestige or legitimacy. Why not just acknowledge that both Theory and cultural studies are what they are--which is to say, they are not literary criticism. They are both more and less than literary criticism: more in that they take all of culture as their domain, less in that by widening the scope of "criticism" so broadly they don't really notice individual writers and works much at all. If nothing else, relinquishing the title to "literary criticism" might revitalize criticism as a general-interest practice and in so doing might bring some needed attention back to the novelists and poets who could use it.